Hello, and welcome to the HoltBlog. We are pleased to welcome sisterray, another great writer to the blog. Sisterray also writes on ThailandStories.com

Dear friend, help us stop internet censorship in Australia

Imagine a government proposing an internet censorship system that went further than any other democracy - one that made the internet up to 87% slower, more expensive, accidentally blocked up to one in 12 legitimate sites, and missed the vast majority of inappropriate content.

Australia is not China, Saudi Arabia or Iran - this is the vision of Senator Stephen Conroy for Australia. Testing has already begun. The community must now move to stop this plan. Click here to save the net:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet

The system that Senator Conroy wants is a mandatory filter of all internet traffic, with the government of the day able to add any unwanted site to a secret blacklist. Already, the wrangling has begun for the inclusion of material relating to anorexia, euthanasia and gambling. It isn’t difficult to see the scheme is open to abuse.

Even when it comes to preventing child pornography, the filter will not prevent peer-to-peer sharing and is very simple to sidestep. The protection of our children is vitally important - that’s why we can’t afford to waste funds on this deeply flawed system. We should be concentrating on solutions that are more effective and won’t undermine our digital economy or our democratic freedoms.

This must rank as one of the most ill-thought decisions of the Rudd Government’s first year in power. We need to act now to tell big brother the mandatory internet filter is incompatible with the principles of a modern democracy and modern economy:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet

Our government should be doing all in its power to take Australia into the 21st century economy, and to protect our children. This proposed internet censorship does neither. Take action to save the net today.

Thanks for being a part of the solution,
The GetUp team

PS - The proposed scheme will pass all internet traffic through a government filter - it’s like asking Australia Post to filter every letter sent in Australia. Click here to save the net.

MAGD is doing an excellent job translating my stories into French. Thank you David. And you can find my stories, as well as those of some of the best writers in Asia on ThailandStories.com. Visit them now, click on Author List and select any author. Enjoy!

Right here on HoltBlog, you will find many original stories about Thailand, politics, and just good fun, as well as some news stories I feel are interesting or important.

Are you a writer? Why not join us and publish your stories here? It’s easy. Register and then send an email to fosterfoskin[-at-]gmail.com to tell me you would like to be upgraded to Author. Then you can upload your stories for our expanding audience to read. Any registrations that do not write to me requesting upgrade to Author status will be automatically deleted.

While you are here, click on the link for any author listed on the right to read their stories.

I hope you enjoy your visit here. Don’t forget to add our RSS Feed to your Bookmarks so that you can see the latest postings. I’ll be posting lots of new stories here all the time, so come on back. Cya!

Hi. Come on in. You must be Dana.

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So why are you here? They didn’t tell me what this visit is about.

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You want to interview me? Not much to tell my friend. Why would you want to write a book about me? I hear you work as a librarian or something. You haven’t ever published a book. So what makes you think my story will finally get you published?

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Yeah, well I guess it won’t do any harm. After all, it doesn’t bother me what you do with my story. I just want to get it off my chest. And it might help others understand how dangerous these Thai women can be, even the so-called good Thai women.

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Thailand, an exotic land that beckoned men from all over the globe had called to Damien less than six months ago. A year before, he’d lost his job at the bank where he had been one of the high-flying fast risers. His fast track to the top curtailed as the economy imploded and banks fell like domino stacks destroyed by a willful child. No more plush office. No more calculating looks from the sleek secretaries as he strode past their desks in arrogant confidence. His Beemer repossessed when he no longer had the income to keep up the payments. His landlord eventually threw him out of his luxury apartment when he couldn’t pay. Damien gradually reduced his lifestyle back to the basics. He found he needed very little when he no longer had to keep up the façade required for success.

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Over the years I have written various stories about why I have lived so long in Thailand. I’ve had a great time here, lived with and loved many wonderful women, worked at various jobs; some good some not so good, but all interesting. I thought I would end my days in this country. But that has changed and now it’s time for me to leave what I thought was paradise.

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April 3

The skinny body lay sprawled in a rice field halfway to Pattaya. It stank as bad as it looked. The head was almost cut off and it lay at a grotesque angle to the body, a macabre red grin almost ear to ear. All four limbs had been severely beaten and broken. His clothes, a scruffy T-shirt and military style trousers were torn in several places and large bruises showed through. Whoever it was he hadn’t died easily Sven Peters thought as he stared at the remains.

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I met her earlier today at Bangkok airport. It had been over ten years since I had last seen her, and, on first sight she had changed immeasurably. We were close at school; Hope’s petite Italian figure with waist length jet black hair would float around the school refectory. She had an olive complexion that would be flawless for three weeks of the month, and then her cheeks would break out into little red spots around the time of her month, her period. The spots were more like blotches, red headless and closely grouped together, like poppy fields. I liked her best whilst she was ovulating; she seemed more accessible to a skinny kid with a restless eager mind and long curly hair at that time. I would follow that figure like a shadow, as she would follow mine. I picked up some strange signals from her puzzled deer brown eyes, my adolescent senses receptive like a brand new television set that desperately needed tuning. But I hadn’t even read the manual yet. I didn’t know what buttons to push or what happened when you pushed them. Clueless, uneducated in the ways of womankind. I feared rejection. Years later, I learnt that the fear of rejection is much worse than actually being rejected. Nobody goes through life without being rejected and the more rejections one receives the easier it is to take rejection.

Back at school she had a nice shape to her, the kind of shape a girl grows into. She was of course flirtatious, and she seemed well versed in the ways of the world. Her mother was a sex therapist and practiced transgressions with some of her patients. Her patients or clients? They always seemed to be male but I was too young to pick up on that at the time. She lived a bohemian lifestyle in a house called crow cottage. The house was always in a mess as I walked up to her box room after school. There would always be a different man lying on his back on the living room sofa supposedly exploring a previous incarnation. Nothing much happened in that bedroom. Her younger brother was always sniffing around. I later found out that he grew up into a strapping homosexual and became involved with a police officer whilst he was still at school, causing a minor local scandal at the time. It made the local newspapers and the family thought it best to move home.

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This video is a must see if you are puzzled by the events currently overtaking the world. Why are banks falling like dominos? Why are people losing their homes? What is the real reason for the war in Iraq? Will you suffer in the coming collapse and what can you do to buffer yourself from it?

Zeitgeist: Addendum (Zeitgeist II)

If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to spread the information and repost this.

I feel the bamboo cane wrap around my rear end and then my thighs, maybe ten, twelve times. I can not run. I have to try and calm her down. I walk forward, the cane whipping me the entire time and I try to pick her up and throw her to the side. She gets up and comes after me. I try to get inside the car. She picks up a concrete block and throws it through the car window.

Looks like I’ll take the motorbike.

As I turn the key she continues to punch and whip me with the cane. I try to push her away and her sister tells me “don’t the police will come” – “Good” I tell them “staying in a cell beats the hell out of all this”

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This is a parody on Ann Coulter and her assertion that the cause of the financial meltdown was banks being forced to give mortgages to blacks and hispanics - i.e. that ‘affirmative action’ was the root of the troubles.

Dear Sirs,

There has been much speculation about the cause of the economic difficulties in which this proud and great nation has found itself. Much of this speculation has pointed at things like CDO’s and other complex stuff the discussion of which is better left to the egg heads on Wall Street. However, in reality, the true cause of this financial system disaster is my next door neighbor the Nigger Johnston.

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Sometimes, love strikes a man when it is least expected. But it’s not the love that is the problem. It’s how to handle it when you do find it.

Chip was a young thirty nine. He had come to Thailand a year ago to work in a top executive position at his US company branch office. He was single, six foot two, brawny, overlong blonde hair with blue eyes, and a cheerful smile that had the office girls whispering excitedly whenever he passed. But Chip wasn’t interested. He knew any romance with one of his workers would be a mistake. He was ambitious. He had no interest in making problems for himself in this dream job.

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